Technical Writing Team

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On this page

• About Us
• Projects
• Responsibilities
  • Content
  • Publishing
  • Processes
  • Collaboration
  • Assignments
    • Assignments to DevOps Stages and Groups
    • Assignments to other projects and subjects
    • Assignments to Development Guidelines
    • Backup technical writers
  • Onboarding technical writers
  • Reviews
  • Merge rights
• Documentation process
• FY20 Vision

About Us

The primary goal of the Technical Writing team is to continuously develop GitLab's product documentation content to meet the evolving needs of all users and administrators.

Documentation is intended to educate readers about features and best practices, and to enable them to efficiently configure, use, and troubleshoot GitLab. To this end, the team also manages the docs.gitlab.com site and related process and tooling.

Our team comprises:

• A technical writing manager.
• A group of technical writers.

Technical writers partner with anyone in the GitLab community who is concerned with documentation, especially developers, who are typically the first to update docs for the GitLab features that they code.

The technical writing team Slack channel is #docs-team and technical writers are also active in the larger #docs channel (both private to GitLab Inc.).

Projects

Technical writers:

• Act as maintainers of documentation for many engineering projects.
• Frequently act as authors or reviewers of the documentation in collaboration with others in the GitLab community.
• Are assigned to specific DevOps stage groups.

For more information on documentation at GitLab, see:

• The Documentation section of the Handbook.
• GitLab Documentation guidelines in the contributor documentation.

Responsibilities

The team is broadly responsible for the following at GitLab.

Content

• Documentation content, including:
  • Developing new content to meet the needs of the community.
  • Reviewing and collaborating on documentation plans, reviewing doc merge requests or recently merged docs, and ensuring that content meets style and language standards.
  • Reorganizing, revamping, and authoring improved content to ensure completeness and a smooth user experience.
• UI content
  • Collaborating with Product Designers on and review of various forms of UI text, such as microcopy, links from the UI to documentation, error messages, UI element labels, etc.

Publishing

Documentation Site (docs.gitlab.com) including maintaining and enhancing the documentation site’s:

• Architecture
• Design
• Automation
• Versioning
• Search
• SEO
• Feedback methods
• Analytics

Processes

Documentation Process, including:

• Ensuring that processes are in place and being followed to keep the GitLab docs up to date.
• Following and optimizing documentation workflows with Product and Engineering, Documentation Team workflows, and the division of work.
• Triaging doc-related issues.
• Refining the Documentation Style Guide and continuously improving content about GitLab documentation and its contribution process.
• Making it easier for anyone to contribute to the documentation while efficiently handling community contributions to docs.

Collaboration

Collaboration, including:

• Working on documentation efforts with Product, Support, Marketing, Engineering, Community Marketing, other GitLab teams, and the wider GitLab community.
• Ensuring that relevant documentation is easily accessible from within the product.
• Acting as reviewers of the monthly release post.

This work is sorted into the top-level Documentation epics linked above.

Assignments

Technical writers (aka "TWs" or "docs team") are assigned to and collaborate with other teams and groups as described on the DevOps stages, Development Guidelines, and other subjects sections below.

Assignments to DevOps Stages and Groups

The designated technical writer is the go-to person for their assigned stage groups. They collaborate with other team members to plan new documentation, edit existing documentation, review any proposed changes to documentation, suggest changes to the microcopy exposed to users, and generally partner with subject matter experts (SMEs) in all situations where documentation is required.

The backup writer is assigned to cover merge request reviews and urgent matters for the designated tech writer when they are out (vacations, sickness, and any other temporary leave). They can also naturally pair to work together on complex issues when needed.

Not sure what group a feature falls into? Search the product categories.

Technical writers are encouraged to review and improve documentation of other stages but they aren't required to. When contributing to docs they don't own, they must respect the assigned TW's ownership and ensure to request their review and approval when adding significant changes to their docs.

Assignments to other projects and subjects

For collaboration in other projects and subjects:

Assignments to Development Guidelines

The Technical Writer (TW) assigned to Development Guidelines (SME) is Marcia Ramos and her backup TW is Mike Jang. As GitLab grows, it's important to keep high-quality documentation and ensure that the guidelines for contributors are consistent and aligned throughout the organization. Development Guidelines consist of:

• GitLab's Development Guidelines: the entire content of gitlab/doc/development/* must be reviewed and approved by the TW assigned to Dev Guidelines.
• GitLab Design System ("Pajamas"): the entire content of contents must be reviewed and approved by the TW assigned to Dev Guidelines.
• GitLab UI: docs within this project do not require TW review. The TW for Dev Guidelines will help in creating and maintaining minimum requirements for these docs through specific guidelines and templates, and assist the team upon request.

For Development Guidelines that may be established in other projects, the assigned TW will help upon request. If a larger project is created with ongoing development, the TW for Dev Guidelines and TW Manager will evaluate with the engineers the necessity of regular reviews.

For content changes specifically related to a particular stage group, the TW assigned to that group can perform the review and then assign the MR to the TW assigned Dev Guidelines for approval/merge.

Backup technical writers

Each technical writer has an assigned backup technical writer that’s listed in the DevOps Stages and Groups assignment table.

Although the usual role of a backup technical writer is to provide coverage for primary writers who may be out of the office, the backup can also be a resource for a stage/group's normal technical writer. For example, depending on their bandwidth, the backup may be able to help with coverage if the primary technical writer gets too busy (such as if the primary writer also has release post duty).

Technical writers should ensure that their out-of-office messaging reflects their backup, and should communicate with their PMs and developers to introduce their backup technical writer.

Whenever you’re communicating with a backup technical writer to ask for an issue's status or their assistance with a technical writing issue, please be aware that they may require additional context, and that your request will need to be incorporated into the list of stage/group and feature priorities for their primary responsibility.

If neither the primary or backup technical writer are available to help, you can post in the #docs-team channel to ask for general assistance for your issue.

Onboarding technical writers

While the technical writer is onboarding, they will be assigned to shadow groups and then start contributing as trainees, as described below. Veteran technical writers will coach them through the process.

To consult the current assignments, see the onboarding technical writers spreadsheet.

Group shadowing

For the first release cycle that begins after the new member start date, they will shadow (read) their buddy's work in their most active Stage Group, plus one other stage group/writer decided with the tech writing manager and the team. Veteran technical writers will proactively share relevant issues, merge requests, and communications with their shadows by using a #tw-onboarding-<groupname> Slack channel, creating it if it doesn't already exist, and answering questions.

Group trainees

For the second release cycle that begins after the new member's start date, unless the tech writing manager extends the shadowing phase, they will act as a trainee on one or more groups as assigned by the manager. The intent is to take on the group as its technical writer as of the next release. The veteran technical writer who is assigned to that Group will assign substantial parts of the work to the new member for this group, which accounts to roughly half of the groups's reviews of MRs with docs, UI text, and release post content; a small but substantial documentation authoring project; a few minor doc improvement projects/fixes.

Group coaching

For the third release cycle, the onboarding tech writer assumes the full role of technical writer for their assigned group, except that they will not yet have merge rights. The former TW assigned to the group is now the coach, who will review all their work (including reviews they perform of other authors) before merging it or approving it for another maintainer to merge. They may share the burden of these reviews with other technical writers.

Reviews

Technical writers are assigned for merge request reviews (of both team members and community contributors) according to the stage groups they are assigned.

Merge rights

The technical writing team is given merge rights (through Maintainer access) to GitLab projects as part of their role. Not all developers get Maintainer access. Technical writers should use this privilege responsibly.

As Maintainers, technical writers should limit what they merge to:

• Documentation, typically in Markdown-formatted files.
• UI text, error messages, and link-related fixes, with the approvals of appropriate engineer(s).
• Documentation-related tooling and configuration such as linters, and changes to the gitlab-docs project.

In addition, before merging such MRs, technical writers should:

• Never merge an MR with a failed pipeline, unless the failures are unrelated to the changes. If in doubt, ask an engineer.
• Ensure that MRs are complete before merging, with appropriate labels and milestones.
• Ensure that the DRI or nominated backup (for the stage or other documentation) has reviewed and approved the MR.

Documentation process

See:

• Technical Writing workflow in the handbook.
• Documentation workflows in the contributor documentation.

FY20 Vision

• New Content Development - Leading the planning and authoring of new content to better meet user needs. This will be a significantly increased proportion of the team’s work, and will make use of improved methods and standards.
  • Authoring docs that better address use cases with A-to-Z process flows, going beyond existing feature references and procedures that can be difficult to adapt to real-world use cases. Supported by updated standards for content types and structure.
  • Getting Started - a.k.a. unboxing or onboarding docs for various audiences and scenarios.
• Content Improvement:
  • Revamping existing content pages/sections, so that they meet our latest standards, including contextual information on every page (what, why, who).
  • Improve use of documentation feedback/sensing mechanisms. Improved sourcing and channeling/triage; making use of existing comments and issues, while bringing in new sources including search data, surveys, user testing, etc.
  • Improve rate of contributions to docs as SSOT and using ‘docs-first’ methods by tracking contributions and demonstrating best practices.
• Docs UX:
  • Next iteration of docs versioning.
  • Removing documentation from /help, linking instead from UI to versioned links on docs.gitlab.com.